 | Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space explores Western cultural messages about disability and otherness. The author was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and underwent several surgeries as a young child. She uses those experiences (and her continued awkward walking pattern) as a lens to explore how fairy tales affected her identity as a disabled person. The author’s personal struggles with her disability are interwoven with insightful analysis of the cultural role of fairy tales and stories on our collective consciousness. The book begins with an interesting exploration of the history of fairy tales themselves. The Grimm fairy tales, for example, celebrated a nostalgic “bygone paradise of rural German life.” |
The author also gives the historic background of the Disney studios and the “Disneyfication” of popular fairy tales. Disney created “a line of princesses who are at once all different and yet entirely the same—all young, all beautiful.”
 | The author gives an especially scathing critique of Rapunzel: “In the seventh edition of the tale [from the Brothers Grimm] . . . Rapunzel tells the prince to come back each time with a skein of silk, which she will weave into a ladder. It is endlessly interesting to me that the prince doesn't come back with his own rope, ready to rescue the maiden—nor does he alert his kingdom to her captivity and come charging to the tower army in hand. She is better in the tower—contained, special. As long as she’s in the tower, she exists just for him.” |
Some of the other stories explored in the book:
- “Hans My Hedgehog,” about an adventurous half-hedgehog boy who sheds his otherness and transforms into a handsome man once he marries a princess.
- In “The Maiden without Hands” a miller makes a bargain with the Devil and barters away his daughter. Rather than go with the Devil, the maiden chops off her own hands. After some misadventures, a king falls in love with her and makes her silver hands. Then the Devil interferes and she is cast out while the king is away at war. The king eventually finds her again. “The queen’s hands have grown back in the interim, as hands in fairy tales are wont to do if you pray hard enough.”
- “The Little Mermaid” makes a bad bargain because of her desperate desire to transform herself for love, and gives up her voice to get legs. Says the author: “Ariel gained her legs by magic. I gained my legs by the less romantic practicalities of orthopedic surgery.”
- Regarding “Beauty and the Beast,” the author asks if the Beast “isn’t made precisely as terrible as he is as a result of the world’s reaction to his disfigurement?”
The author explains how many of these fairy tales are based on ableism: “a system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, and excellence.”
 | In all of these stories transformation happens to the protagonist, not society. In fairy tales, “we support and perpetuate a culture where the emphasis is on the cure rather than societal change—where the aim of the narrative is to eradicate the disabled life rather than change the world so that the disabled life can thrive.” The author delves into her personal history with disability relative to these pervasive stories: “When you are taught from the time you are a young child that the disabled body is weak and other, set apart, you partake in a world that seeks to entrench this otherness through systemic and cultural barriers. You participate in a culture, even unknowingly, that furthers disabled exclusion.” |
The author explores several models of disability:
- The social model says disability is “maintained by systemic barriers, exclusion, and negative attitude toward these disabilities more than the physical limitations or conditions themselves.” Buildings with ramps and elevators don’t create the same barriers as those with steep stairs.
- The medical model sees disability as an individual defect that “must be cured or eliminated if the person is to achieve full capacity as a human being.” This is based on the belief that there is only one “right” way to move or be in the world.
- The charity model “depicts disabled people as victims of circumstance who are deserving of pity” and “as long as individual charities and charitable actions exist to make gestures toward those who are less fortunate, there is less need for . . . sweeping societal change.”
 | The book closes with a manifesto asking for new fairy tales, such as the “queen in a wheelchair marries no one because she doesn’t need to marry to show that her life brims with joy.” She goes on: “Give me stories where disability is synonymous with a different way of seeing the world and a recognition that the world can itself grow as a result of this viewpoint.” The author invites the world to “start telling different stories about a body that might just look like mine, and reshaping the world to fit them. I am already enough. There is no need to be more.” |
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space provides a comprehensive overview of Western fairy tales and the messages they convey about disability, personal transformation, and cultural norms. Thank you to my local library for this fabulous read!
For more insights on ableism and disability, read Disability Visibility,
Disability Intimacy, and Being Seen
Disability Intimacy, and Being Seen
